Since May of this year I’ve been trying to build up my Illustration/general design skills some with an hour or so of life drawing each day. I’m focusing mainly on pen work as I reckon this forces you to concentrate on line economy and weight far more so than the forgiving (erasable) pencil. Over the last month I’ve started to mess around with Watercolours via this excellent book as recommended by this blog post. Its a damn tricky medium, coming from colour pencils and Photoshop but I love the fact its so unpredictable. Alot of texture can be achieved by scratching the surface of the paper with various objects or by lifting the colour with sponges, plastic bags or tissue. There’s something nostalgic about pen and ink illustrations too, harks to the 70’s and 80’s probably from having this book read to me a few thousand times as a nipper.
Elsewhere’s the last two weeks I’ve been mostly at WordPress coding. Both are farily minimal in design but complex’ish in functionality – in that I’ve integrated features I’ve haven’t made use of on a site before: Icon fonts, of which i’ll definitely be making more use of in the future and picture based news feeds, something I’ve always wanted to do but hadn’t yet got a suitable commission for. Due to the usual time restrictions work is progressing slowly on the music side of things but progressing none the less. Twill have more production time in the new year gawd’ willing.
